1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a stereo-image displaying technology, particularly, it relates to a stereo-image apparatus and method of reducing stereo-image cross-talk.
2. Description of Related Art
The stereo-image displaying method has entered the commercialized stage with display devices being rapidly developed. Development of the stereo-image displaying apparatus will become the main stream in terms of manufacturing the next generation of displaying device; and this has gained the consensus among the industries. The need for the naked-eye stereo-image displaying technology is increasing among the industries of medication, exhibition, entertainment, education, military and advertisement, etc. Nevertheless, the development of the stereo-image displaying technology still faces various obstacles. One of the obstacles comes from the limitation of the displaying device technology itself. So far, the bottleneck obstructing the stereo-image displays to be commercialized resides in the failure of the displaying quality to meet the user's demand such as the viewing angle and the number of observers. The cross-talk between stereo images is one of the touchiest issues in the industry. In terms of the image displaying quality, the stereo image technology has not been greatly improved; particularly, the solution to the problem of the cross-talk between stereo images has not been solved effectively. The cross-talk between stereo images disturbs the human brain from getting depth perception seriously.
The cross-talk between stereo images has been an important issue to be resolved in the study of the stereo image displaying apparatus. In a time multiplexed displaying apparatus, the stereo-images are usually displayed in page-flipping method. The major cross-talk problem comes from the slow responding time of the display media (e.g., the liquid crystal) of the stereo image displaying apparatus. Currently, the main stream of flat panel displaying apparatus is LCD apparatus which is non-self-illuminating displaying apparatus with respondent property different from the past CRT typed self-illuminating displaying apparatus. Particularly, the responding speed of the stereo-image needs about twice the responding speed of a traditional 2D display. Due to the need for fast responding speed in the stereo-image displaying technology, the cross-talk between images of the left eye and the right eye becomes a serious issue.
According to the visual characteristic of human eyes, a depth perception will be produced when the left and the right eyes respectively see a pair of images with the same scene but different parallax. When the operation speed of the image display is not fast enough, such as the image formed in the left eye remaining in the right eye upon changing views and vice versa, the so called cross-talk occurs. In other words, when the left eye sees images formed in the left eyes, another residual image is overlapped at the same time. This residual image comes from the previous image of the right eye. FIG. 1 shows a schematic view that illustrates the traditional cross-talk phenomenon. In FIG. 1, in an ideal condition (the left figure), Image signal 100 is for the image of the left eye and Image signal 102 is for the image of the right eye. Under this condition, the display device only displays images formed in the left eye. If the cross-talk of the residual image phenomenon (the right figure) happens, the display device displays the remaining image 104 of the left eye and the image content 106 of the right eye.
Traditionally, the image processing method is used to solve the aforesaid cross-talking problem. In other words, FIG. 2 shows that a schematic view that illustrates a traditional mechanism in which the image processing is used to improve the cross-talk problem. By way of the image process method, the left eye's image is used as a complementary image 108 which is displayed together with the image 110 of the left eye. In this way, due to the remaining image, the complementary image 108 which has been processed ahead eliminates the cross-talk between images so that no image remains in the left eye.
However, the disadvantage of the above-described technology is that the contrast of the image in a single eye is reduced. Thus, other methods to solve the cross-talk between images are still under development.